by James Johns
As the Pacific commanders struggled throughout 1941 to build up their defensive resources, the navy would lose some of what they already had. Another obstacle in building up in the Pacific came with the historic foreign aid bill, Lend-Lease. Early in the spring of 1941, Kimmel had lost over forty of his ships to the Atlantic Fleet, unofficially, to support the delivery of Lend-Lease to Great Britain. His contribution to Lend-Lease included one aircraft carrier, the USS Yorktown (CV-5); three battleships, the USS New Mexico (BB-40), the USS Mississippi (BB-41), and the USS Idaho (BB-42); four light cruisers and eighteen destroyers.54 Many of his experienced officers and seamen were transferred back to the States as well, to man new ships just being launched. These personnel were replaced with inexperienced crews that would take time to train. With the replacement of competent officers and enlisted men by new officers and recruits, more than half of the Pacific Fleet was manned by new personnel, and at times, three-quarters of them had never heard a gun fired. With the loss of ships and experienced personnel, Kimmel’s fighting strength was reduced by roughly 25 percent.55 It has been observed by many that Japan’s final decision to attack Pearl Harbor was made after these transfers, leaving just eight old battleships and three carriers at Pearl Harbor.
And by December 7, the analyses of Admiral Bellinger and General Martin would hold true. Their predictions that Japan would likely employ up to six carriers and would strike from either the north, south, or the west at a distance of 233 miles out, was virtually a blueprint of what was to come.
Chapter 5
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Lend-Lease and Its Delivery
The big debate in Congress in January and February of 1941 was: would Lend-Lease actually keep the country out of war or take the country into war? How had FDR’s assurances and the people’s protestations come to this? Lend-Lease was a foreign aid bill for which no author could be found that virtually gave dictatorial powers to the president to decide who, when, and how much recipient nations would receive. With the president’s insistence on passage of H.R. 1776, so called to give it a patriotic flavor, and with the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, it nevertheless stirred bitter arguments like none in recorded history, with many in Roosevelt’s own party taking issue. FDR had just won his third term as president on the assertion that he and he alone knew how to keep America out of war. His Republican counterpart, Wendell Willkie, had also campaigned to keep the country out of war, but his credentials lacked the experience of the presidency.
In 1940, both the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago and the Republican National Convention held in Philadelphia were solidly antiwar. And even though both FDR and Willkie made solemn promises to keep the Americans out of war, events in Europe continued to heat up. It was also in 1940 that Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France fell to Germany, leaving Britain to stand alone.
Though England had just barely survived the Battle of Britain, German U-boats had since surrounded the British Isles and were tightening the noose. Britain was starting to starve. British war production could not compete with German war manufacturing, and now it looked like just a matter of time, measured in months, before Britain would fall.
It had been a scant twenty years since the conclusion of the Great War, and now it seemed that the clock had turned back to 1917. President Woodrow Wilson had told Americans that they were fighting for lasting peace in the world. World War I had been the war to end all wars. By 1939, one who wanted to remind Americans of the “agony and devastation”1 suffered in the preceding war was Republican Senator Gerald Nye. Roosevelt was pushing to get his cash-and-carry amendment to the Neutrality Act passed, and Nye told the American people that Americans should mind their own business this time around, a concern he expressed to Congress on July 18: “With that experience still fresh in our minds, it is amazing that so many persons, in high and low places, should forget the lesson of 1914 and 1917,”2 adding that the country was already on its way into another conflict. “Steps are being taken, policies are being inaugurated, precedents established today that in large degree parallel the ‘road to war’ which American[s] trod only a little more than 20 years ago.”3
In early 1918, President Wilson had composed his fourteen points that would guarantee the Great War to be the final world conflict. But the Treaty of Versailles, which was aimed at bringing peace between Germany and the Allies of World War I, had only incorporated a few of them. The U.S. Congress had voted not to join the League of Nations and wanted no further involvement in European affairs. In 1932, while seeking the Democratic nomination for president, Franklin Roosevelt had stated that he personally was against the United States’ getting involved in the League or any other European affairs. After his election in 1932, the 1935 Neutrality Laws were the next logical step. Trade or loans to belligerent nations had become forbidden, and all exports had to be paid for before leaving the American ports. The effort to prevent a shooting war on the high seas, however, was exactly what would get the Americans into the next war.
The Japanese invasion of China in July 1937 and the German occupation of Poland in September 1939 resulted in the repeal of various sections of the Neutrality Laws, to the point that, on November 3, 1939, the American government allowed cash-and-carry arms sales to China and Britain.
Now that Great Britain was the last democratic fortress in a Nazi-occupied Europe, FDR became convinced that if Britain fell, sooner or later, the Americans would have to fight Hitler alone. But the United States would not be fighting only Hitler, since in September 1940, Germany had joined with Japan and Italy to form the Tripartite Pact. To fight one would be to fight them all. As long as Britain survived, the United States would be safe. In looking ahead, had Britain fallen, from where would U.S. strategic bombing of Europe have been conducted? From where would an invasion have been launched? Neither would have occurred, and the world would be far different today. There is evidence that Churchill had provided the initial idea for Lend-Lease by suggesting a type of aid that would be free of the dollar sign. But he would later insist that the idea was FDR’s.
But involvement of any sort was bound to incite the American public that, up to this point, was so bent on isolation from European affairs that they had even objected to the arms industry having profited during the last war. It would require a selling job to the nation, after years of promising to keep Americans out of war, that would be risky. Roosevelt now had the delicate task to risk his popularity with his change of direction that was bound to embitter Americans. He had to choose his words carefully.
Starting with his regular fireside chat of December 29, 1940, FDR warned Americans that Hitler and his Axis partners could dominate the rest of the world if Britain fell. Rather than live “at the point of the gun,”4 he suggested that the United States should become the “arsenal of democracy”5 and give full aid to Britain, regardless of threats from other countries. He then stated, “You can, therefore, nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.”6 Over the next few months, Americans were hearing what the president was saying when they should have been listening to the nonchalant undertones. As he emphasized the need to defend the nation, Americans could not consider such defense a foreign war, and “Of course, we’ll fight if we are attacked. If somebody attacks us, then it isn’t a foreign war, is it?”7 “We cannot escape danger, or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads,”8 followed by, “A nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender.”9
The president and his Democratic platform had promised to keep the United States out of war with statements like, “We will not send our Army, naval, or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of attack…. The direction and aim of our foreign policy has been, and will continue to be, the security and defense of our own land and the maintenance of its peace.”10
But since the November election, the president was making some alarming retreats. After the New Year of
1941, he was making promises to aid peace-loving peoples around the world, “consistent with law and not inconsistent with the interests of our own national self-defense.”11 At the same time, FDR offered the solution of how to aid American allies and still remain neutral on a casual basis. His solution came in the form of Lend-Lease.
On January 3, FDR announced to members of the Senate that he would propose to Congress “a comprehensive plan for all out-aid to Great Britain ‘short of war.’”12 The plan would involve establishing a government corporation to manage the program. The big question in FDR’s mind and the crux of the whole problem was how to satisfy the American people on how the Lend-Lease would be repaid. Britain could be solvent one day and broke the next. In his December 17 press conference, reporters had pushed Roosevelt, asking how the aid to Britain would be financed. Avoiding questions pertaining to the legal technicalities, he used the analogy that if his neighbor’s house caught on fire, he would be perfectly willing to loan his neighbor his garden hose. After the fire was extinguished, he expected his neighbor to either return the hose or replace it. In essence, Americans were morally committed to loaning armaments to Britain, and one way or another, things would work themselves out. Whether it was through actual payment, trade, or return of the goods loaned, Americans would eventually be repaid. But how would Britain return war goods that had been expended?
To aid the Allies, FDR was sure that a way could be found, and then added that he was sending his personal friend, confidant, and advisor Harry Hopkins to Great Britain to hopefully smooth things out. When the news media inquired as to a specific mission or government compensation for the trip, the president responded that although they might cover some expenses, Hopkins was “just going over to say ‘How do you do?’ to a lot of my friends.”13 Based on Hopkins’s direct approach in getting to the bottom of things, Roosevelt was confident that Hopkins would return to the United States with a clear picture of Britain’s situation, details with which to sell his Lend-Lease program to Congress. Without going into detail, Hopkins himself expressed his role in going to London as simply acting as the catalyst “between ‘two prima donnas.’”14
At his State of the Union Address on January 6, 1941, FDR told Congress and the nation of his plan to supply huge quantities of weapons, munitions, tools of war, and other commodities to be supplied on loan or lease by the U.S. government. Although these goods would not be paid for by the American taxpayers, the up-front money must be borne by American citizens and businesses and not by the governments that receive them. “For what we send abroad, we shall be repaid within a reasonable time following the close of hostilities, in similar materials, or, at our option, in other goods of many kinds, which they can produce and which we need.”15 But in the meantime, the taxpayers would foot the bill.
Harry Hopkins, after resigning from his secretary of commerce post in September of 1940, now assumed what could be a delicate mission. At issue was FDR’s request for the British gold reserve in South Africa to be transferred to Washington, which was deemed by Winston Churchill as “a sheriff collecting the last assets of the helpless debtor,”16 to support the cash-and-carry rule until the commencement of Lend-Lease. This assumed, of course, that FDR could sell his plan to Congress. As far as the legality of this scheme, international law was quite specific. Any neutral government that supplied weapons of war to a belligerent nation at war does itself commit an act of war. However, FDR insisted, “Such aid is not an act of war, even if a dictator should unilaterally proclaim it so to be,”17 inviting an attack on the United States.
Congress was about to have a field day. This would not be a party-versus-party issue. On the day following the president’s announcement, Democratic Senator Burton Wheeler, speaking for many of his colleagues, called the plan “idiotic.”18 “If it is our war, we ought to have the courage to go over and fight it, but it is not our war.”19 In a subsequent radio broadcast, Wheeler went on to say, “Never before has the Congress of the United States been asked by any President to violate international law…. Never before has the United States given to one man the power to strip this Nation of its defenses. Never before has a Congress coldly and flatly been asked to abdicate…. The lend-lease-give program is the New Deal’s triple A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy. Approval … ‘means war, open and complete warfare.’”20
Similar to Democratic Senator Byrd’s previous support of FDR, Burton Wheeler’s relationship with Roosevelt went back to 1932, when he ardently campaigned throughout the west for Roosevelt’s election. While he supported Roosevelt’s New Deal, their break would come when Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court in early 1937. Of the opinion that Roosevelt’s lust for power was getting out of control, Wheeler was quoted as saying, “Once he was only one of us who made him. Now he means to make himself the boss of us all.”21 As a noninterventionist, Wheeler opposed any aid to Britain, and became the Senate’s lead of the opposition to Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program. When asked about the Lend-Lease being a blank-check bill, FDR responded:
Write me another that you would not put that label on, but which would accomplish the same objective. That is a perfectly good answer to all these people. That is not an answer at all, however, to those who talk about plowing under every fourth American child, which I regard as the most untruthful, as the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that has ever been said. Quote me on that. That really is the rottenest thing that has been said in public in my generation.22
But when a correspondent inquired as to who had made the original statement, it would have been difficult to admit that it had come from his own party. The best that Roosevelt could recall was that he had read it someplace.
In deliberating the pros and cons of the proposed Lend-Lease Bill, members of Congress questioned the matter of delivery of this arsenal. It made little sense for Americans to manufacture these war goods, load them onto British ships in U.S. ports, only to have them sunk by German U-boats on the high seas. To use American ships to convoy would not only be a breach of international law, but it would also invite Americans into a shooting war.
Representative Hamilton Fish (R–NY) pushed this point in his March 30, 1941, speech in Washington with, “The signal bell ringing in the engine room of an American naval vessel to start the first convoy would be the equivalent to a declaration of an undeclared war by the President.”23 Fish did grant some leeway to Roosevelt, stating that he didn’t believe the rumors that the administration had already decided to convoy. Nonetheless, he added that if the rumors turned out to be true, and if “the Pied Piper of Pennsylvania Avenue leads the American youth to war in spite of his promises and pledges for peace, I know of no language strong enough to denounce such a betrayal of trust.”24
Unless there was a guarantee of delivery to at least Iceland, Lend-Lease would achieve nothing. When questioned, FDR assured the public that he had never considered the use of American ships. Certainly those in favor of Lend-Lease did not want to see the shipments go to the bottom of the ocean, but more importantly, they didn’t want to see American men and boys winding up there either. In their view, seeing to it that the goods got to Britain was up to the British Royal Navy.
The Lend-Lease Bill as presented to Congress was a means of helping Britain to survive Germany’s siege without direct U.S. involvement. It authorized the president to lend, lease, sell, exchange, or transfer title of any military equipment, planes, guns, munitions, ships or any military goods deemed essential to the survival of any government on whom the Americans would depend for their own survival. Who would be the recipients, what goods would be involved, and the conditions of transfer were all at the discretion of the president. U.S. shipyards would be prepared to receive, overhaul, or recondition British ships with the repayment conditions also at the discretion of the president. Nor was Roosevelt required to report any of this to Congress. His decision would prevail.
The congressional deliberations immediately brought a number of questions to l
ight. Who authored the bill? If it were to become law, would this material get overseas with the help of the U.S. Navy, or would the shipments be left to the fortunes of the German U-boats? If the United States Navy convoyed, was that not an act of war? Finally, was this bill designed to maintain U.S. neutrality or was it fulfilling what many perceived as FDR’s underlying wish to bring the Americans into the conflict?
The authorship of the bill would certainly betray its motives. An extensive search was made but no originator could be found. Many in the FDR inner circle could conceive his craftiness, his deviousness to create such a bill, giving him such unprecedented power. It was for that very reason that nobody would admit to being author of the bill. At long last, Senator Alben Barkley (D–KY) admitted only to being its sponsor in the Senate, as did Majority Leader John McCormack (D–MA) of the House. (In addition to his Lend-Lease support, it would be McCormack’s vote that would carry the House in extending the Selective Service Act just prior to Pearl Harbor.)
On the second point concerning opposition to the bill, it was argued that it would be sheer nonsense for the United States to manufacture war materials from ordnance to aircraft, then ship it all to Great Britain only to be sunk on the high seas by German U-boats or surface raiders determined to make sure it never reached its destination. On the other hand, if the United States protected those ships with U.S. naval convoys, wasn’t that an international act of aggression that would bring the Americans to war?
When Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, a new Republican appointee and former publisher of the Chicago Daily News, was questioned, he stated that he was personally against naval convoying because it was risky. But Knox continued by commenting that if the president ordered him to do it, he would commit that act of war in obedience.